No Stupid Questions

A lot of technological flux going on right now, what with an entire generation partially trained to do WFH and job mobility that brings, the retirement of the tech-phobic boomers, the extremely tight labor market, Russian money going to "more important endevors" (which might also be why bit coin is down), and AI threatening to automate 80% of the workforce. Tech company owners are frightened and making random dumb or scared decisions because of it.

It's corporate greed. They're just trying to get (more) money out of their users pockets. They're starting not to design their products in a way that the most people use it, but in a way that they get the most money, time and useful, valuable data from their users. That's less people but more profit.

Netflix is showing similar behaviour at the moment.

It' simple: Greed is the reason.

This is pretty typical for all big companies that take off there is a tipping point when it goes from agile and nimble start up to behemoth company that needs to pay dividends, only they have captured all the market share they can capture and may in fact losing people to other newer services. They're panicking and trying to make things look profitable before it all collapses like Yahoo and they can't sell it. Just my take on it all anyway.

I don't know honestly, greed probably. But it's such a shame. It seems like the internet as a whole is heading in a horrible direction, and not enough people care about it for there to be something done about it.

Turns out infinite growth without covering your costs doesn't work out

I think the main problem with these companies and the startup/tech bro culture (mostly in the US) is that they are growing for the sake of just growth itself, because they want to get their own. The original idea is to grow as big as they can, IPO, then sell it off. They weren't designing things to be profitable from the start. So eventually they all reach a stage where they are hemorrhaging money too much, and that is where all the enshittification happens (investors come in, they try to make it a real business now, but it wasn't really feasible to be a business to begin with).

The venture capitalists that have funded these programs at a loss for years have decided they want to see a return.

One thing is chain reaction, another is that these media mostly came to existence in the same period of time. So they were aging synchronously.

This was predictable and predicted many times. Just like a building constructed with violations is not going to collapse immediately after it's finished, these things were not going to break (in various ways) immediately after being launched.

They are breaking now. Oopsie.

I hope XMPP makes a triumphant comeback. It's not dead yet.

its the eshitification of the internet....it's inevitable

Because they are all beholden to shareholders, not users (or prepping for IPO)

https://medium.com/@mikegrindle/reddit-and-the-enshittification-of-social-media-659d41b5ab73

Honestly? I don't care. I don't use corporate "social" media and I'm very happy with the Fediverse. If you do something for profit, profit will always come first. Even before I became a Fedizen, I knew public discourse cannot reliably be provided by greedy corporations. I'm just surprised it didn't happen earlier and that the people are surprised about what's happening now.

Capitalism. Companies go public (or already were public) and then they can no longer be happy with what they had and need to acheive infinite profit growth. That's partially why companies like Valve, that are still luckily entirely private, can make seemingly consumer-focused decisions and not just chase infinite profits. That's how they've been able to invest so heavily in Linux with such little short term gains. Valve still makes shitty decisions sometimes but it would be 10x worse if they decided to go public.

We see that Twitter was been purposely twisted to be a comfortable space for neo-Nazis. We know spez's politics. It doesn't take much of a leap to conclude that he's killing off the moderator class to make Reddit more friendly for the neo-Nazis. Most likely though that's just a convenient side-effect of unbridled greed, though.

$

Twitter is sui generis because they were acquired impulsively by a maniac. But for the others, I think it’s just that interest rates were super low for a long time and now they’ve gone back up to a more historically normal level.